Vestige
by Amiisarr
Summary: All she has to do is survive. All that's left is to keep living in the hope that maybe, someday, things would get better. Sasusaku. Post-apocalyptic AU.
1. The Beginning of the End

**Title:** Vestige

**Summary: **All she can do is survive. All she has to do is keep on living, in hopes that maybe, someday, things will get better.

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Naruto. Also, the original idea for this story comes from Neko-Graphic, and her story "Welcome to Hell". You should read it, it's an amazing story.

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><p>.<p>

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**C**_h_a**p**_t_e**r **_O_n**e**

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**T**_h_e **B**_e_g**i**_n_n**i**_n_g **o**_f_ t**h**_e_ E**n**_d_

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When Sakura was a little girl around the age of five, her father taught her how to survive. Together, the two of them would go out into the mountains near their rural village for weeks at a time doing nothing but keeping each other alive.

Most of the time, Sakura hated this. What's the _point_? She would ask petulantly and stomp her little foot. To her father's credit, he never became angry at her. He knew that it would be hard for someone so little to understand the necessity of being able to rely on only oneself. With years of practiced patience the man would kneel down in front of his pouting daughter and pull her into a tight hug which she would reciprocate, albeit grumpily.

"You'll understand when you're older, Sakura dear, I promise. For now, let's check the traps and see if we've caught anything for dinner, shall we?" would be his calm reply, every time.

Fifteen years later, Sakura was finally beginning to understand what her father was talking about.

_Fifteen years later. _

It seemed like the world had ended. From her apartment near the outskirts of Tokyo, Sakura had heard the news on her television one morning while she prepared her ritualistic cup of coffee. It was a parasite, the news anchor said, that infected people, destroyed the cortex of the brain and took over your motor functions, allowing it to control your body and attack others. Please stay inside at all times, the lady on the television said, right before a cameraman shambles on screen and took a chunk out of her neck.

"On my god," Sakura gasped, taking a small step away from the screen just as screams emitted from the speakers for a few seconds before the TV displayed nothing but static. _What the hell_? Sakura thought, hands covering her mouth in horror. What was going _on_?

What she had just witnessed couldn't possibly have been real, could it?

_Could it?_

Sakura reached for her phone and thumbed through her contacts before she came upon the number of her best friend. She pressed enter and held the phone up to her ear.

There was nothing.

Eyes furrowed, Sakura pulled the phone away from her ear and stared blankly at the screen. There was no signal. The pink-haired girl was going to cry out in frustration and fear but was cut off when the power went out.

The young woman stood in her kitchen for a minute, illuminated by nothing but the morning sun as it shone through her living room windows. She stared, wide-eyed, at the blank television screen in front of her for a few minutes, deciding if she was going to start hyperventilating or not. She decided on the latter.

Realization came to the pink-haired pre-med student, who quickly walked back to her bedroom, threw open her closet door and reached for a hiking backpack that sat, neatly tucked in a back corner, covered with shirts and shoes.

It was her emergency backpack. In it were two changes of clothes, 2 flashlights, a water filter, a first aid kid, three-day's supply of non-perishable food, a bottle of antibiotics and Tylenol, a heavy-duty pocket knife and host of hygiene items. Pulling it out of her closet, Sakura threw it on her bed and reached to the floor of her closet for her hiking boots.

Sakura wasn't really thinking. She knew that what she had just heard was an impossible situation coming to life, and most likely the end of the world as anyone knew it. She also knew on an instinctual level, however, that no matter how impossible the situation sounded, it was a good idea to take her father's years of coaching and play it safe.

So she pulled on her boots, reached for her rain jacket that lay across her desk chair and pushed her arms through that, slipped her backpack straps over her shoulders and headed for her front door. As soon as she was outside, she heard the panic. Everyone had gotten in their cars and the sounds of yelling and honking were overpowering. On top of those sounds, though, were the low moans that seemed to bypass Sakura's brain and headed straight to her heart, which set it pounding wildly. It sounded like death.

The green-eyed woman knew she had no weapon to properly defend herself. All she had on her was her pocket knife, which she figured would do jack-shit against an undead monster. So she did the only thing she could think of.

Hiking her backpack up higher on her shoulders, Sakura set out for the mountains, five miles from her apartment building, at a jog.

_Six months later._

Sakura sprinted like her life depended on it, because her life depended on it. She ran down the abandoned streets of Tokyo at full tilt, her breath coming in sharp pants. Behind her, shambled hundreds of undead.

The noise they made was like something out of a nightmare, with their eerie moans and skin-crawling gurgling sounds. As the woman's feet pounded the pavement, she risked a glance backwards to see that she was gaining some ground. With renewed energy, Sakura turned a corner into a dark alley and kept running. She made a few more random turns before she stopped dead in a small square between what appeared to be four apartment buildings.

A large group of zombies turn their heads at the sound of her entrance.

"Shit," she panted, eyes already searching for a new way out just as the shambling army following her began to make its presence known in the small courtyard as well.

Sakura reached into the front pocket of her backpack and pulled out a pistol she had filched off of an abandoned police car a few weeks ago; even though she knew it would be useless. But maybe someone would hear the shots and have the decency to help her.

She really doubted it, but she had no other option.

The stench at that moment, as hundreds of undead monsters converged on her, was particularly overpowering. It smelled like rotting flesh and decaying life and if Sakura wasn't so concerned about getting _out of there_, she might have puked.

With the monsters stumbling towards her on both sides and no obvious way out of the situation, Sakura contemplated turning to barrel of the pistol towards her temple and pulling the trigger. She wasted half a second of her nonexistent time to glance down at the heavy metal machine in her hands before deciding that she'd rather go down fighting then take the coward's way out. So with that thought, she raised the gun, aimed, and started firing.

This seemed to make the mob angry as members of their own started falling and their moans became screeches of animalistic rage. After she had downed about five of the undead beasts, something caught Sakura's eye on the other end of the courtyard; a door, slightly ajar, on the second floor of the apartment building that lead out to a balcony. No zombies had come out of that door to investigate the noise, so Sakura came to the conclusion that that room had to be zombie-free.

Sakura made her decision just as zombies from both sides reached her, arms outstretched and trying to grab at her flesh. She shoved the pistol into the waist of her jeans and smacked an incoming festering appendage out of her face as it tried to reach for her hair, turned to her right and ran towards the wall. She kept her arms up around her face to buffer more limbs that reached for her and stuck near the wall, trying to run around one of the groups to reach the wall with the open door.

At one point, when she was feet away from being directly under the balcony, one of the infected managed to grab a fistful of her light pink hair in a death grip. Sakura cried out at the feeling of pain and absolute terror that shot through her as it pulled her backwards towards its decaying body, the monster intent on tearing the flesh off her neck.

"No…!" she cried loudly, one hand gripping the monster's in an attempt to loosen its grip and the other reaching into her side pocket to pull out a switch blade.

With expert fingers she flipped it open and in one quick motion, brought it up near the base of her ponytail and sheared her ponytail right off her head. She had no time to think about her actions; instead she took the next few strides that would put her directly underneath the balcony and planted a foot on the wall, using it as leverage to push herself up, arms outstretched.

Her fingers wrapped around the base of the wrought iron fencing and with all of her strength, Sakura pulled herself up. Once she grasped the top of the railing and swung herself over onto safety, the pink hair girl collapsed, breathing frantic and chest heaving from fear.

_I almost just died_, her brain whispered to her, and she thought for a minute she might be going into shock.

Her newly cut hair tickled her cheekbones and blew slightly in the wind as her head bowed forward in an attempt to catch her breath.

The abominations below her were moaning their protest at their lost prey, arms reaching up to try and get to her. The balcony she was sitting on, however, was a few inches above their outstretched fingers and they couldn't get her from there. For the moment, she was safe.

With a slightly hysterical giggle, Sakura pulled herself up and fully opened the door that lead to the empty apartment she was currently taking refuge in. It was dark – the curtains were drawn and there was no source of light inside the small complex, not that she expected there to be. The young woman pulled the pistol out of her pants and zipped it back up into her backpack, swapping it out for a flashlight, which she flipped on.

The small living space was trashed, like someone had raided it. The dining room table was flipped on its side, facing the door, and the chairs were mysteriously missing. There were no signs of life – or _non_life, she supposed – and Sakura took the opportunity of her relative safety to set down her pack and look around.

Her first stop was the kitchen. When she began opening the cabinets, she expected to find nothing, but to her surprise, they were incredibly well stocked. Stacks of cans of nonperishable food sat a few rows deep, in the majority of the cabinets. The rest held tens of bottles of water. The stove was a gas stove, and sitting on the counter next to it was a pot, a lighter, and a pile of cups of instant ramen.

At the sight of all of the food, Sakura's stomach rumbled and her mouth began to water. She had been living off trapped squirrels, the occasional rabbit and whatever she managed to scavenge from different abandoned shops the few times she wandered back into the city from the wilderness.

That was the reason for Sakura's current predicament. She had decided it was time to head back into the city, see if she could find some more food to help ease the almost constant ache in her belly. Eating nothing but squirrels wasn't healthy, and she knew that she was becoming dangerously thin.

With not a thought as to why that much food was being stored in the small apartment, Sakura ripped open a styrofoam cup of ramen, pulled open a water bottle, dumped it into the pot and lit the stove with the lighter, setting the water on it to boil.

Sakura was finally satisfied after she had consumed three packages of instant ramen with a fork she had found in one of the drawers. Her body satisfied for what felt like the first time in years, Sakura continued her tour of the flat until she found the only bedroom.

"Oh, yes. A _bed_," Sakura moaned in pleasure and with no preamble, fell on top of the unmade mattress. In minutes, with an unhealthy lack of wariness considering she was in an unknown place surrounded by monsters that wanted to eat her, Sakura drifted into a deeper sleep than she had had in months.

つづく


	2. The Meeting

**Title:** Vestige

**Summary: **All she can do is survive. All she has to do is keep on living, in hopes that maybe, someday, things will get better.

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Naruto. Also, the original idea for this story comes from Neko-Graphic, and her story "Welcome to Hell". You should read it; it's an amazing story.

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><p>.<p>

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**C**_h_a**p**_t_e**r **_T_w**o**

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**T**_h_e **M**_e_e**t**_i_n**g**

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Sakura woke up to the feeling of cold metal being pressed against her temple.

_Shit, _she thought, and immediately stilled her body, a trick she had taught herself from months of living on the run. She knew where she was – in the bedroom of the apparent safe house she had found the night before when running from the army of undead. Apparently it wasn't as abandoned as she had thought.

It was the barrel of a gun pressed against her head, she could tell from the round impression it was leaving on her skin.

"I'm awake, and I'm going to show you my hands – which are empty, by the way – so don't shoot me," she told the person with the gun against her head in what she hoped was a strong voice. Very slowly, as she had said, she raised her hands from under the blankets, palms out and empty.

Her head was pressed between the pillow and the gun, so from her position she couldn't see who was in the room with her. All she could see were a pair of legs dressed in dirty, loose jeans – a man, then, from the look of it.

Even with her hands raised, the gun was still pressed to her head. She heard someone scoff, and then some quiet, furious whispering that she didn't catch – two people, then – possibly two men. After another quiet second, she was finally greeted with a voice.

"Are you infected?" it was a deep voice, hoarse and scratchy – from lack of use, she assumed – and it sounded very adamant that she answer.

"No. I've never been bitten. Scratched, but not bitten. I'm clean," she responded, her ears ringing with adrenaline and hope that they wouldn't shoot her. Another second passed, and the gun was finally removed form her head. With a quiet thank you to no one in particular, Sakura pushed the covers off of her and sat up on the edge of the bed.

The two men in frond of her seemed very large from her sitting vantage point. They were both tall and lean and looked like they both had led physical lives, even before the end of the world.

The man holding the gun was much paler than Sakura, who had lived out in the woods for months, her skin was dark from the sun. His eyes were a dark grey, almost black and narrowed in wary speculation, and they matched his equally pitch colored hair.

The man behind him was his polar opposite. The other man had bright blond hair and equally bright blue eyes that were wide and happy and complimented his large grin.

Sakura brushed her cropped pink hair away from her face and stared at whom she figured her biggest threat was – the black-eyed man, who still held his gun. Stiffly, slowly, still wary of the gun in the man's hand, Sakura stood.

Just as quickly, she fell back onto the bed with a hiss.

Her calf burned white hot when she stood, so she looked down and grimaced. Her jeans, right above her hiking boots, were pasted onto her right calf with dried blood. She tried to remember where she had gotten the wound, and she figured it must have been when she had swung up onto the balcony. Being chased by a horde of the dead had left her filled with adrenaline and then, as soon as she had figured she was safe, she had been so tired that she had practically passed out – she must not have noticed she wounded.

The blond haired man sucked in a breath through his teeth, stepped closed and crouched down on his haunches to look at her leg.

"That looks bad," he said in a voice ringing with concern. Sakura was bemused by his attitude – there were still nice people in the world? She didn't know that there were still people out there who sympathized. She shook her head to clear her thoughts and decided to go with it.

"It can't be a bite. It must have happened yesterday, and I haven't changed, or gotten sick. It's just a scratch," she seemed to be reassuring herself, more than them. Now that she had noticed the wound, it burned her entire calf.

The black haired man muttered a quiet oath, shoved his pistol back into a holster on his right thigh – much to Sakura's relief – and stalked out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, where the blond man and Sakura could hear him shoving things around.

"My name's Naruto, by the way," said the man sitting in front of her, and he offered his hand, which Sakura shook. He seemed like a nice man, and it would be good to have someone on her side – or at least not particularly want her dead.

"Sakura," she replied with a small little smile, which Naruto returned tenfold.

"How'd you get in here, anyways? The door was padlocked," he questioned Sakura as she stood up tentatively, draping her pant leg back over the wound with a grimace.

"The porch door was open," she responded. Thinking back on her monkey maneuvers to get to her current safe haven, she felt smug. _I'm pretty good_, she thought. Her smugness increased when Naruto's mouth opened and then closed again without a sound.

"Wait, what? The porch door? This is on the second floor. It's too high to reach, especially for someone as short as you," he finally replied, and Sakura let out a small laugh.

"I jumped."

"Close your mouth, dobe," snorted the dark haired man as he reentered the bedroom holding a small bowl of water, a washcloth and a roll of bandages. He set them down on the floor by Sakura's feet where she still sat on the bed, and with not another word said, sat in front of Sakura, picked up her leg, briskly rolled her pant leg up and started cleaning her wound with the damp washcloth.

"Hey!" Sakura tensed but didn't pull away. Her fingers curled into the blankets under her hands, her knuckles turning white.

"Sasuke, she jumped up onto the back deck," Naruto stated. Sakura assumed that "Sasuke" was the name of the man currently cleaning her leg.

"I heard, dobe."

"But… she's so _little_," Naruto said.

Sakura snorted.

"I'm not that little," she argued weakly. Sasuke shot her a dubious look. She hissed in a breath as he started wrapping her leg in gauze to hold the wound closed. Her leg jerked even as she tried to keep it as still as possible, and Sasuke planted one hand over her knee to brace her leg as he continued to wrap the scratch with his other hand.

"So, uh, sorry about breaking in, but I was about to die, so I feel relatively justified," Sakura was so hopped up on relief that she wasn't dead and the aftereffects of the adrenaline rush when Sasuke had pointed his gun at her head that she felt giddy.

Sasuke gave her a weird look.

"Anyone besides the dobe and myself would have shot you straight up or raped you if they had come across you sleeping like we did. With carelessness like that, I'm surprised you're still alive," Sasuke stated dryly.

Sakura's giddy mood instantly died, and suddenly she was tense with worry, because Sasuke was right. She had made a grave mistake last night, and just because it had turned out all right didn't mean it couldn't have had terrible consequences. Her time in the forests had dulled her sense of danger from not only the undead, but the living, as well.

_The living can be just as bad as the dead, sometimes_, she reminded herself sternly.

Naruto seemed to sense the change in her. He smiled at her encouragingly.

"It's all right now, though. You can stick with the bastard and me. We could use someone small like you to get into hard-to-reach places anyways. Right, bastard?" Sakura found herself eager to stay with these two men. They seemed nice enough in their own ways, and Sakura very much liked the idea of having someone watch her back.

"I have some medical training, too," Sakura added, hoping to sway Sasuke into her favor. He was quiet for a minute as he finished wrapping up Sakura's leg and pulled her pant leg back down.

"As long as you can keep up."


	3. The Dream

**Title:** Vestige

**Summary: **All she can do is survive. All she has to do is keep on living, in hopes that maybe, someday, things will get better.

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Naruto. Also, the original idea for this story comes from Neko-Graphic, and her story "Welcome to Hell". You should read it; it's an amazing story.

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><p>.<p>

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**C**_h_a**p**_t_e**r **_T_h**r**_e_e

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**T**_h_e **D**_r_e**a**_m_

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They let her sleep on the bed the next night while Naruto and Sasuke swapped between keeping watch and sleeping on the couch in the living room. Sakura insisted they let her keep watch too, but they refused. _They don't trust me yet_, she thought, _and they're right. I'm just some random person who barged into their safe house. I could try to murder them in their sleep for all they know._ Still, she felt useless, a feeling she despised.

Even though she got to sleep in a bed for the second night in months, she slept fitfully, in and out of nightmares all night. The groans from the courtyard had receded slightly during the previous day, the monsters probably having given up on getting a piece of her any time soon and gone to find easier pray. At least, that's what she hoped had happened.

She grumbled in exhaustion, annoyance and a sort of permanent fear, rolled over onto her side and pulled the blankets up over her head to try and block out all outside noise.

A few minutes later, her constant exhaustion won out and she finally fell back asleep just as the sun was starting to creep up over the horizon.

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><p>She was having a nightmare again – one she had often. It was pitch black, nighttime, and Sakura was standing in the middle of an abandoned road, rusting cars lining the street, some with doors hanging open and almost all of them with smashed windows.<p>

She was barefoot. Every time she had this nightmare, she was barefoot, and she didn't know why. Those days, she rarely ever took off her hiking boots, even to sleep. Her clothes were torn as well, the button on her jeans ripped off and the collar of her t-shirt torn down to her chest.

Always, she was filled with gut-wrenching fear. The kind of fear that makes you want to freeze in your tracks and just lie down and die, but at the same time it made you want to run as hard and as fast as your body could take to get away. She was filled with the kind of fear that made her heart pound in her throat and tears prick behind her eyes and dread fill her stomach like a toxin.

In her bare feet and ripped up clothes, Sakura spins around, head whipping this way and that, paranoia feeding her fear. Nothing around her moved that she could see in the dim glow of the stars, but Sakura knew, she _knew_, that someone was there, watching her.

With a strangled cry that forced its way around her heart lodged in her throat, Sakura picked a direction and sprinted – shattered glass ripped into her feet but her adrenaline blocked the pain. She kept running and running and running but when she glanced behind her in the scant light, her surroundings haven't changed. She hasn't moved.

"What-," she gasped, eyes wide with fear, hands tremblingly pulled into fists at her sides, body tight with tension. Something brushed against her shoulder. Sakura yelped and whipped around, but nothing is there. Another brush – it almost felt like a hand – on the back of her arm. Sakura jerked her arms around her torso and spun around again, but still saw nothing but the unmoving cars that surrounded her.

"Sakura."

"Leave me alone," Sakura murmured, hands coming up to cover her ears so she couldn't hear the voice whispering her name.

"Sakura."

"No, no no no…" she moaned, knees collapsing and falling into a fetal position, head tucked against her legs. The voice was taunting her with its presence, making her think that she wasn't alone, that she wasn't the only person there. She was _always_ alone in this dream.

"God dammit, Sakura. Wake up, will you?" With a jolt, Sakura came to, jerking up into a sitting position, gasping like she had run a marathon. Her heart was still pounding from her dream.

Sasuke leaned over her with a scowl on his face, glowing in the light of the morning sun leaking in through the window on the other side of the bedroom. All of the menacing gloom from her dream disappeared in the bright room, and Sakura began to relax.

Sasuke was still standing over her with his arms crossed and a peeved look on his face, but Sakura didn't care because she had been dreaming and she wasn't anymore, which meant she was safe – for the moment.

"Sorry," Sakura apologized, once her heart rate was under control and she didn't feel the need to scream any more, "it was a, uh, nightmare." She felt awkward saying it, like it made her appear weak. She didn't want to be weak in front of these new people, because she needed to show them that she could be trusted.

But all Sasuke did was shrug, an up and down movement of his shoulders that seemed to convey to Sakura a feeling of "_I understand. It happens._"

"Naruto should be up in a few. Once he's up, we're going to pack up everything we can and leave. With all those creeps you brought with you yesterday, we can't afford to stay here anymore. Get ready and get your stuff packed." With his message delivered and nothing else to say, Sasuke left the room, leaving the door open behind him.

Sakura didn't gape after his brusque departure; she didn't flush in embarrassment at his slight accusation. With a small, determined nod to herself, she got out of bed and walked into the adjoining bathroom, hoping to find a washcloth.

Ever since the beginning of the plague, or whatever it was, all of the water had been shut off. When Sakura had been living in the woods, that hadn't really been much of a problem because she'd had a water filter and access to plenty of rivers.

Now, when she had no water to spare, the need to be _clean_ overcame her with its intensity. Sakura paused in the doorway to the bathroom and thought, _when was the last time I was actually clean? Before the world went to shit_, came her immediate answer. With a small shiver of disgust, Sakura decided that if she could go so long without properly cleaning herself, she didn't need to start now, when water sources were scarce and unreliable.

She abandoned her search for a washcloth and instead made her way to the living room where Naruto was sprawled on the couch, limbs akimbo, a blanket strewn over him and his mouth open wide in a silent snore.

Sakura was suddenly filled with the urge to cry.

"He looks so… peaceful," she said in an almost awed voice. _How can he sleep so soundly and so… carefree, with everything that's happening? How can he do that?_

In the kitchen, stuffing a rucksack with water bottles and cans of food, Sasuke snorted.

"That's because he's an idiot," was his reply.

Sakura ignored the sarcastic man and crouched down on her haunches in front of the sleeping Naruto. His eyes were closed, but his face was open with the kind of honesty that only came with sleep. He had scars lining his cheeks, like claw marks. _They look like whiskers_, Sakura thought. His eyelashes were long and blonde, like his hair, and almost feathery.

He looked like an angel that had tripped out of Heaven and fallen into Hell.

"Naruto, he… he doesn't seem like the kind of person that could survive the stuff that's happening. I mean, he's obviously not weak but… he seems like the kind of person that would break, you know? He just seems so… innocent."

Sakura was having a hard time putting her thoughts to words. She didn't know why she was saying all of this out loud anyways, to someone potentially dangerous, but with Naruto lying so peacefully in front of her, his calm seemed to seep into her.

The bustle of Sasuke moving around in the kitchen stopped, and Sakura glanced over to see him giving her a thoughtful look. She stared back at him, eyes wide and curious, as he considered her.

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><p>Sasuke honestly had no idea what to think of the woman in front of him. Her vibrant hair and eyes reminded him of Naruto and the affect they seemed to have of making Sakura look much more innocent than she probably was.<p>

Her eyes though, even with their bright green hue, held a sense of worldliness in them, like they had seen everything and were deeply tired. She had obviously been through a lot, but then again everyone who was alive at this point had. The world was a different place these days, and only the smart and the strong survived.

Looking back at Naruto, Sasuke smirked. The idiot had charmed their new companion just by _sleeping_. He'd always had that kind of affect on people.

"Naruto is a special case. You can't really compare him to anything," Sasuke finally said as he went back to packing his bags. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Sakura nod thoughtfully.

Just as she started to stand up, Naruto jerked awake, flinging the blanket off of himself and jumping to his feet in one solid motion.

"I'm awake!" he cried with a grin, no hint of sleepiness or grogginess about him.

Sakura, completely startled by Naruto's sudden movement, yelped and tripped over herself, coming to a crash on her back on the floor a few feet away.

Naruto pulled his hands over his head in a stretch and gave Sakura a weird look.

"You okay?" he asked, as if she had fallen over for no reason and he was concerned for her mental safety.

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><p>Sakura wanted to hit the man and laugh at him at the same time. The end result of her conflicting emotions was a jerky cough and wide, angry eyes. Still in the kitchen, Sasuke snorted.<p>

Sakura, slightly confused but mostly over her shock, shook her head and got up off the floor. She grabbed her pack, which was sitting next to the couch, and pulled it open. All of her things were in disarray, stuffed in with no care about placement. That wasn't how she had left it last.

Her eyes turned accusingly to Naruto and Sasuke, who seemed to understand the reason behind her dark look. Naruto shrugged unapologetically and Sasuke ignored her. She scoffed and dumped everything out so she could organize it all and repack.

"As long as they didn't take anything…" Sakura grumbled and started putting things back it. All of her stuff was there except her gun. She wasn't really that surprised by that, but she was surprised that they had let her keep her knife.

Naruto and Sasuke were standing by the front door armed and waiting for her, their packs slung over their shoulders and strapped around their waists. Two pairs of eyes watched her as she flung her own backpack over her shoulders and clipped it into place, keeping her knife in hand.

"Ready?" Sasuke asked, his hand on the doorknob.

Naruto grinned widely, his teeth yellowing but still vibrant, as Sakura nodded.

"Let's go."


End file.
